Automated Digital Morphometry of Peripheral Blood Smears Detects Both Infrequent Events and Cellular Population Patterns in Myelodysplastic Syndrome

Background: Complete Blood Count (CBC) analytical capacity is falling short of recognizing informative RBC morphology or WBC dysplastic morphological changes. Current morphologic peripheral blood smear (PBS) analysis is performed manually using a semi-quantitative scale on a limited number of cells introducing high degree of subjectivity and low sensitivity. The novel Full-Field Morphology (FFM) technology developed by Scopio Labs performs PBS analysis on a significantly larger scale of 1000 fields of 100X view in a routine manner, allowing a precise and highly sensitive automated quantification of cellular and sub-cellular morphological parameters. Current diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) is based on invasive bone marrow aspirate, followed by subjective morphological analysis. In this study, we applied this digital morphometric approach to compare PBS morphology of MDS patients with age-matched controls.